1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to conference call systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system for identifying a person speaking on a conference call to the other, remotely located conference call participants.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conference calls are common practice in many businesses. Frequently many people will gather in a conferencing room and a speakerphone will be used to link the conferencing room to a conference call. When one of the persons in the conferencing room speaks on the conference call, the remotely located participants of the conference call (outside of the conferencing room) often times do not know the identity of the speaker.
It is not productive to interrupt the conference call to ask the identity of the speaker. It is also not productive for each person to state their name prior to speaking on the conference call. Both instances take up conference call meeting time. Therefore, there has existed a need in the art to automatically identify a person speaking on a conference call to the other remotely located participants in the conference call. The solution has proved to be especially difficult and costly when the person speaking is in a room of people and communicating over conference call equipment shared by all of the people in the room, rather than interacting one-on-one with personal telephone conferencing equipment.
One solution to the problem can be found in an undated article entitled “Smart room: participant and speaker localization and identification,” by Carlos Busso et al. of University of S. California, found at: http://www.ict.usc.edu/publications/busso-smartroom-icassp.pdf, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
In the article, Busso et al. describe a system employing four cameras in the four corners of the conferencing room, a full-circle 360 degree camera located at the center of the table, and an array of 16 microphones. The three monitoring systems are integrated with the microphone array being used to localize the sound source and for voice analysis identification and the cameras being used for position tracking and facial identification. The software and hardware requirements of the Busso et al. system are rather complex and costly.
Another solution to the problem can be found in an anonymous, undated article entitled “Meeting Room, an Interactive Systems Labs. Project, What, When, Where, Who, to Whom?” found at: http://penance.is.cs.cmu.edu/meeting_room/people_id/, which is hereby incorporated by reference. Like the Busso et al. system, cameras are employed and face identification is used to identify the person speaking. Again, the software and hardware are relatively expensive and computational requirements are robust to operate the system at a level to provide reliable identification of the speaker.
US published application 2005/0135583, incorporated by reference herein, discloses a system for identifying participants speaking on a conference call to other participants. When more than one participant is present in a room and using a common speakerphone, the system uses voice pattern recognition or a person presses a button while speaking to make his identity known to the other conference call participants. Pressing a button is an extra manual step and an inconvenience to the user. Voice recognition, while automatic, is computationally complex and looses accuracy as the pool of potential conference call participants grows in a large company or university setting. Further a voice analysis system requires all potential conference call participants to register a voice pattern with the system, such as by reading a prescribed text passage which is time consuming, and the system would also require memory storage space for the many voice patterns.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,959,074, incorporated by reference herein, also discloses a system for identifying participants speaking on a conference call to other participants. Like published application 2005/0135583, U.S. Pat. No. 6,959,074 utilizes voice recognition to identify the speaker.